Printer manufacturers often provide printer status information to their users via desktop notifications. For instance, a user may receive a pop-up in his/her taskbar that indicates when a printer is running low on ink or toner. However these pop-ups are driver-specific, limited to single manufacturer, and generally non-customizable. As a result, if a user has several different brands of printers installed on a network and/or device, the user is typically unable to check the status of all of his/her printers in a unified interface and may have to install separate services for each printer and/or printer manufacturer to receive status information for those printers. These disadvantages are further exacerbated in a corporate environment when numerous (e.g., tens, hundreds, thousands, etc.) printers of different makes may be installed on a network. In these more complex environments, users (e.g., facilities personnel) are generally relegated to manually checking each of the printers for toner information or installing numerous different tracking applications in order to effectively track the status of those printers.
In addition, while some existing solutions may notify a user when a particular make of printer is out of ink or toner, and allow the user to click through various dialogs to order replacement cartridges, these solutions fail to interface with multiple different printer makes (e.g., HP®, Epson®, Brother®, etc.) to provide comprehensive up-to-date status information (e.g., ink levels) for all available printers. They also fail to provide ordering options for ordering cartridges for any of these makes from a unified interface and generally lack configuration options to allow a user to customize notifications based on certain needs (e.g., business needs, policies, requirements, etc.).